These were among my findings when I studied nearly a million comments made on The New York Times website. Women and men differ substantially in how they engage with online media. And these differences may have profound implications for media, gender equality, and even our democracy…

…Women were clearly underrepresented in my data. They made only a quarter of comments, even though their comments got more recommendations from other readers on average. Even when they did speak up, they tended to cluster in stereotypically “female” areas: they were most common on articles about parenting, caring for the old, fashion and dining. (Women got more recommendations than men on most of the sports blogs, but they still made, for example, only 5 percent of comments on the soccer blog.)

It seems unlikely that these effects are confined to The New York Times; studies of online commenting find broad signs of inequality. (While women are well-represented on some websites, like the image-sharing site Pinterest, these sites do not tend to focus on expressing and defending opinions. Online forums that do often have mostly male commenters: examples include Wikipedia edit pages, the social news site Reddit, and the question-answering sites Quora and Stack Overflow)…

…While we focus instinctively on how to get women to talk more, there’s another possibility: that men should talk less…

You and everybody else. The human condition. You get to choose how you are going to feel about something. You don’t get to choose what actually happened in real life that you have those feelings about.

b_marco

Thanks for clearing that up. The next time I’m unsure about basic philosophical perspectives I’ll be sure and give you a ring. But If “everybody else” includes you then count me out. And seeing as how it’s “express our feelings” time…

I’m still pondering this…while I read about male/female differences. It might help to reintroduce other retro rules too, say, you have to be a tax-payer.

Xavier

Property ownership is the old saw that everyone criticizes but it actually makes sense. Property ownership implies a lot of things, like maturity, paying taxes, saving money, and foresight. None of those are guaranteed but in a large sample they’d probably be accurate.